The Witches of Canyon Road, Books 1-3

by Christine Pope

  Instead, I turned away from the water and walked back toward the house. From this vantage point, it appeared friendly enough, a large square structure in the traditional pueblo style, with a sizable covered patio that looked out over the garden, a built-in kiva fireplace, and some cast-iron furniture to complete the outdoor space. If I were here with anyone else, I might have enjoyed sitting out on that patio, even at this time of year — after all, that fireplace had been put there to allow the home’s residents to be outside as long as the weather wasn’t too cold. However, I certainly didn’t want to participate in such cozy activities with Simon Escobar.

  He came out through the French doors and stood there, watching as I approached. A brief squint up at the sun, which was now moving ever lower toward the west, and he said, “Beautiful day, isn’t it?”

  I made a noncommittal sound. Although I didn’t want to directly contradict him, neither did I have any desire to agree that it was in fact a beautiful day. How could it be, after the scene in the church earlier, after he’d coerced me into coming here with him?

  A brief tightening of his lips was the only sign that I’d gotten to him. Still in that friendly, casual tone, he said, “Come on. There’s something I want to show you.”

  That was about the last thing I wanted to hear from him. I could feel myself tense, but I nodded, pretending that his comment hadn’t sent alarm bells sounding through my entire body.

  We went back inside the house, and he led me past the kitchen and into the garage, where his white BMW SUV was parked. I glanced at it for a moment, wondering if he planned to take me somewhere, but he ignored the vehicle and went over to a little alcove off the main part of the garage. It was the sort of place you might use for storage — and in fact there were metal shelves on all three walls filled with cans of paint and stucco patch and all the other detritus of a house that’s been recently remodeled.

  Then I noticed the trap door in the cement floor.

  “This is part of the reason why I wanted this house,” Simon said, kneeling down so he could grasp the latch and lift the piece of roughly painted plywood out of the way. “I guess the previous owner was going to build a wine cellar down here, but he never got past digging out the space and laying the cement slab. Still, that was all I really needed. Come on.”

  “You want me to go…down there?” I asked, gruesome images from every horror movie I’d ever seen replaying in my head. Not that I really expected Simon to be taking me down there for some sort of ritual human sacrifice, but….

  He laughed, pausing on the top step. At least there were real stairs — unfinished plywood, but sturdy-looking enough — but even so, I had absolutely no desire to set foot on them.

  “It’s fine,” he said, extending a hand. “Come on.”

  The last thing I wanted to do was have him holding my hand as I went down the stairs. Unfortunately, I had a feeling he would be annoyed with me if I refused him. I swallowed, then stepped forward, let him wrap his fingers around mine.

  That weird sensation of wrongness I’d sensed from him was gone now. I had no idea whether it was because he’d figured out that I’d detected it somehow, and was now masking it the same way he could hide his magical nature, or whether some sort of terrible spell had been fresh on him previously, and that was the only reason why I’d felt something was off. Either way, rather than being reassured that he seemed better — for lack of a different word — I could only feel disquiet move through me once more. There were so many layers of deception in Simon, I had no true idea what about him was real.

  If anything.

  There was a light switch on the cement wall near the top of the stairs. Simon flicked it on, so at least we weren’t descending into utter darkness. The air felt damp and cold, but it didn’t have the kind of harsh mildew odor I’d been expecting. No, instead it smelled almost sweet.

  I saw why soon enough. The area that had been carved out for the wine cellar was perfectly square, about twenty feet by twenty feet. Chalked on the cement floor were intricate symbols, similar to the ones I’d spied in the little shed on the back forty of the Tesuque property, but much, much more complicated. To one side was a low table draped with a black cloth, and the same tarnished silver candlesticks with black candles sat there, with the cruel curved knife in the center of the altar. Off to the other side was a small table — really, more like a plant stand — on top of which rested an ebony incense burner inlaid with what looked like mother-of-pearl. It was from the incense burner that the sickly sweet scent emanated, and I had to hold back a cough, even though no incense was burning now.

  “So you got a replacement for your little shed,” I remarked, still trying to sound casual, although being that close to the knife and the arcane sigils on the floor was enough to set creepy crawly sensations moving down my spine and every limb.

  “Oh, it’s more than that,” Simon replied. He went over to the table and ran a finger along the hilt of the curved dagger, although, to my relief, he didn’t pick it up. “There’s a power in the earth, and power in this place being so close to water. Air we already have, and fire is easy enough.” With a snap of his fingers, the black candles in their tarnished holders lit themselves, adding to the sickly illumination from the overhead fixture.

  “‘We’?” I repeated, unease stirring somewhere in the pit of my stomach. I knew I didn’t want to be involved in anything that might take place in this dank little underground chamber.

  “Yes, we.” He turned back toward me, a strange light flickering in his black eyes. “I was able to summon the demons without any assistance, just like the brother your Levi murdered so many years ago.”

  As far as I could recall, Levi hadn’t murdered anyone. He’d had to kill Matías Escobar in self-defense. Then again, I hadn’t been there. I didn’t know for sure exactly what had happened, except that Levi had sealed the portal which had allowed the demons to come through to our world.

  “Then you don’t need me, do you?” I asked. Even though I knew such an attempt would probably be futile, I still eyed the steps going up into the garage, wondering whether I’d be able to make it very far before Simon caught up with me. Or, better yet, if I teleported the hell out of here.

  No, I couldn’t do that. Too many lives were at stake.

  “I do need you,” Simon replied. He moved closer to me, a lot closer than I would have liked. I was barely able to keep myself from flinching as he reached out and took both my hands, wrapping his fingers tightly around mine. At least his skin was warm, but to me it felt like the unhealthy heat of a fever, not the reassuring warmth I experienced whenever Rafe had held my hand. “You see, to make sure no one tries to contest me, I need more than an army of mindless demons. Those I’ve summoned have only the crudest intelligence, and they can’t be trusted to carry out all my plans. That requires a certain kind of demon.”

  “What kind?” I asked, barely able to get the words out past the growing tightness in my throat. While I wasn’t worried about him trying to conjure Beelzebub or Asmodeus or the Devil himself — we weren’t talking about the demons and devils of Christian mythology here, but a kind of creature that existed on a different plane entirely — there were still entities in other worlds we absolutely had no place messing with.

  “He is a lord of demons, one who rules over those I’ve been summoning,” Simon replied. For someone who was suggesting summoning beings of intense, alien power, he looked a bit too casual, despite the way his hands remained wrapped around mine. “But because he’s so powerful, I need you to combine your gifts with mine, Miranda. I need us to join our powers to bring him to this plane.”

  “You’re crazy,” I whispered, and Simon immediately shook his head.

  “No, I’m really not. The two of us together can do this. I know we can.”

  Without worrying about the consequences, I pulled my hands from his. “You can’t seriously think I’d be okay with helping you summon a demon even more powerful than the ones you’ve already called
here. It’s too dangerous.”

  A frown creased his brow, but he still looked almost too relaxed, as if the outcome of our argument was a foregone conclusion, and he was only allowing me to make my protests because he knew he’d wear me down in the end. “You need to think about this, Miranda,” he said softly. “Think about the Castillos, these people you claim to care about. I don’t want to hurt any more of them…but I will if you won’t help me.”

  I wasn’t surprised by this threat; I’d been expecting it. “By helping you, I’d be putting them just as much at risk.” And the whole world, I thought, but I doubted that argument would carry any weight with Simon. “You think that you’ll be able to control this being you want to summon, but if he’s as powerful as you say, I don’t see how he would ever obey your commands.”

  “Because he would be bound to me,” Simon said, his tone completely reasonable. Too bad I knew his arguments were basically the exact opposite of reasonable. “That’s how these things work. I’ve studied how to do this — do you think I learned something like that in high school?”

  He pointed at the complicated patterns and sigils on the floor, and I swallowed. No, he had to have delved into some pretty arcane materials to come up with all that. I remembered how he’d told me that he’d hidden his magical nature from the de la Paz clan, posing as a gardener or house cleaner or whatever else it took in order to get close to the books on magic and ritual they’d been collecting for generations. That they possessed these things wasn’t any real secret, although no one talked about it much. They’d always been more interested in the knowledge behind magic rather than its actual practice.

  What frightened me now was that I couldn’t know for sure whether he’d actually drawn all these patterns correctly. One line off by a degree or two, the wrong symbol used in a critical spot, and all those fancy markings on the floor wouldn’t be of any more use than a hopscotch grid. And when a summoning like this went wrong, it went horribly wrong.

  He had trapped me neatly, that was for sure. I had to go along with his plans for this ritual, because if I didn’t, I could be the cause of the spell backfiring…and I knew I didn’t want to be anywhere around if something like that happened.

  “You say that it’s going to work that way,” I told him. “But how do you know for sure? This isn’t a simple demon we’re talking about, right? Who is it?”

  “I can’t say his true name,” Simon replied. “It’s part of the summoning. But one nickname for him is the Lord of Chaos.”

  That epithet sounded vaguely familiar, as if I might have once heard someone mention it someplace within earshot. Or maybe I just wanted it to sound familiar, because I had to admit that “Lord of Chaos” didn’t sound like a very friendly person. “I’d think chaos is the last thing you’d want,” I remarked. “Considering you’re so into making sure you have control of everyone and everything around you.”

  “You’re missing the point,” Simon said. “He’s extremely powerful, and because he’s chaotic, any attempts by the Castillos to bind him — even if they have someone with this kind of talent, which I seriously doubt — are going to fail.”

  None of this was reassuring in the least. I had no reason to believe Simon could control this being any more than I or one of the Castillos could. What would happen once it was let loose on the world?

  “But you can control him,” I said, not bothering to hide the skepticism in my voice.

  “Together, we can control him,” he corrected me. “That’s what I was talking about you — you and me together, harnessing his energy. He’ll be our servant, and the Castillos will have no chance of fighting back.”

  I didn’t want anyone to be my servant, least of all a demon with the unappetizing name of “Lord of Chaos.” Besides, I’d seen plenty of horror movies that involved demons and devils and what-have-you, and it never seemed to turn out well for the people who did the summoning. You’d think they would have learned.

  “It sounds exhausting,” I said. Although the last thing I wanted to do was seem at all friendly, I had to do something to get Simon off this tear. I moved closer and laid a hand on his arm. “Can we talk about this upstairs? It’s cold and damp down here.”

  He hesitated for a moment, eyes searching my face. I didn’t know what he was looking for, but I had to hope I looked as guileless as possible, that I was only asking him to go upstairs because I was getting chilled in the little underground chamber, and not because looking at all those diagrams and symbols on the cement floor had begun to make me feel almost physically ill.

  “All right,” he said at last. “We can’t do the summoning until three in the morning anyway. I just wanted to show you.”

  I managed to smile. “Thanks, Simon.” I let go of his arm, and he hung back while I began to climb the stairs, then followed a moment later. Soon enough we were back in the relative brightness of the garage, although I couldn’t quite shake the sensation that something was now watching me, a cold intelligence not quite of this world.

  No, that had to be just the heebie jeebies. Simon hadn’t opened a portal yet, hadn’t uttered any words of a spell. So much of our magic was done by sheer strength of will, by calling forth the powers hidden within us, but this kind of a summoning would require an incantation, a rigid ritual to ensure that the entity being summoned would be properly controlled when it emerged on this plane.

  If such a thing was even possible. I’d seen Simon’s powers at work myself, but even he was overreaching here. Whether I’d be able to convince him of that was uncertain at best. The thing he wanted above all else — yes, above even me — was to take control of the Castillos, to give himself the status in this clan that he’d been forever denied by the Santiagos. Obviously, he was willing to take enormous risks to achieve that goal.

  For the moment, about all I could do was be relieved that we had some time before this supposed ritual was going to take place.

  When we came into the kitchen, Simon took both our glasses and refilled them, then handed me mine. “Drink it all,” he commanded me. “You’ll need to drink at least eight glasses between now and the ritual, to purify yourself of any toxins you might be carrying with you. And we’ll both have to fast until then.”

  “Do we really need to do this tonight?” I asked, although I took a few obedient sips of water once I was done speaking. “I mean, this doesn’t sound like the sort of thing we should rush into.”

  “It’s two nights past the full moon,” Simon replied. “That’s what I need — that waning power, the power of the dark, but one that’s more powerful than a waning quarter moon, or a crescent moon. We can’t afford to wait.”

  I hated how he kept saying “we,” as though I’d already agreed to this insanity, rather than doing my best to talk him out of it. “I don’t even know what to do — ”

  “You don’t need to do anything,” he cut in. “I’ll be doing all the work. I just need to borrow your power to make sure the spell is strong enough. In the meantime, though, we’ll both need to purify ourselves.”

  That sounded ominous. Our kind of witchcraft didn’t require purification rituals, unless you counted quiet meditation to center one’s mind as a kind of ritual. “Purify?”

  He smiled at me, but that glitter was back in his eyes, the one that told me he was thinking of matters that were anything but pure. “We’ll need to bathe — separately, if you were worried about that.”

  Of course I was, but I didn’t want to come out and admit it. I settled for giving a noncommittal shrug, and he continued.

  “I’ll give you some incense to take to your room. For the rest of the day, once you’ve bathed and cleansed yourself” — he paused there, and I wondered if he was thinking about my boast about having sex with Rafe multiple times — “then you’ll sit quietly and meditate, and keep drinking water. That’s all. I need you to be focused, not distracted by inconsequential things.”

  I couldn’t think of anything less likely to keep me from being distracted t
han asking me to meditate. Many of the witches in the McAllister clan were very good at it, but I’d never been able to count myself among their number, maybe because I’d never seen much need for focus because of my sad lack of any magical skills.

  Well, all that was in the past. I’d do my best to get my brain to cooperate, not because I wanted to help Simon, but because I was scared shitless of what might happen if his spell backfired and this Lord of Chaos was set loose to go rampaging through this plane of existence.

  “Got it,” I said, my tone neutral.

  He appeared pleased that I didn’t want to argue anymore. “Drink up,” he said, “and then I’ll refill your glass and bring a pitcher by later on.”

  I didn’t really feel like chugging the water in my glass, but I knew he wasn’t giving me much of a choice. Without replying, I lifted the tumbler to my mouth and drank the water all down, then held the glass out to Simon. Still wearing that pleased expression, he refilled it.

  “Good. Go on upstairs. Run a bath, and use the bath salts in the little canister on the shelf by the tub.”

  None of this sounded very reassuring — what if he decided to walk in on me while I was naked in the bath? — but I didn’t argue with him. I had to hope that he was serious about this whole purification thing. Trying to get down and dirty with me while I was in the bathtub didn’t sound like a very good way to remain pure.

  “Okay,” I said, then took my glass of water with me and went upstairs. Since Simon didn’t immediately follow, I supposed that meant he wanted me to go ahead and get started.